Taking fan votes 'under consideration?'

The Boston Globe's Kevin Dupont believes that the fact that the presence of four Montreal Canadiens players on the fan-voted Eastern Conference All-Star team's starting lineup illustrates a critical error in the way that the NHL counts fan votes--mostly because it counts them:

January 11, Boston Globe: The CH starters are Andrei Markov and Mike Komisarek on defense, along with Alexei Kovalev at forward (running with Penguins Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin) and Carey Price in goal. Fine picks, each and every one of them - for second-line forward, No. 2 defensemen pairing, and backup goaltender.

All of which again proves the old adage repeated by GMs through the ages: Listen to the fans, and you'll end up sitting with them.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with allowing, encouraging, and engaging fan participation. But it only takes a cursory look at "Dancing With the Stars" to figure out that vox populi should be given only so much of a vox.

Let the people vote. Let them jam the Internet the way Jacques Lemaire bottles up the ice. But don't let their votes (read: fanaticism) take away from the good work of guys who truly deserve to be named starters.

The "election" process should be handed over to a select group of GMs and coaches, and they should in turn be handed the tally of the fan votes for consideration in making their selections. Perhaps that will dampen, shall we say, the enthusiasm of the public electorate, but it will go a long way in naming the 12 players who most deserve to be identified as the best at their positions over the first half of the season.

Montreal fashions itself as the center of the hockey universe. It has the Stanley Cup flags to back up the claim that the game is at the center of its culture. If class and culture speak for themselves, too bad the lack of it found a voice via text messaging and the Internet. There were no paper ballots. Good news for Habs fans: no fingerprints.

I have nothing but bad things to say about the farce that the NHL's All-Star fan balloting process has become, but I also believe that eliminating fan participation in one of the few places that the NHL gives its fans a say is equally unacceptable. Fans voting the starting lineups? Maybe not, but fans voting in an all-fans' team? Definitely.

As I also astutely avoided taking Latin and/or classical studies at every turn, I had to look up "vox populi," a.k.a. the "voice of the people." One could find a term with less negative connotations for the uninitiated intelligentsia.